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Having inherited family traits of depressive moping and obsessive compulsiveness, I make every effort to lead an unexamined life – who needs that constant reminder of everything that’s gone wrong?

And yet this morning, a brief flash of memory while shaving answered two mysteries for me.

The first mystery is my preference for SEC football. Conference rivalries are supposed to be all consuming, but I revel in the madness of the top-end of the SEC, as opposed to the near-random variability of the Pac 10 when teams can completely change their complexion from week to week.

The second mystery is why I am such complete putty in the hands of southern belles. I mean, beyond the obvious fact that so many of them are charming and so on, but still… I used to work with a woman from South Carolina who had deliberately taken on a neutral-ish mid-Atlantic mien to avoid being treated as if she were stupid. Since I’m not dead, I was aware that she was an attractive woman – but when she demonstrated her use of her “actual” accent to persuade people to let her off the hook from something, I was ready to leave home. Fortunately the missus arrived home before I finished packing my bags, I regained my senses, and order resumed.

It’s not that either of these phenomena is unusual in the global sense; it’s the “why me” part that remained unclear – or least it did until I was shaving this morning and something reminded me of the source. When I was but a little DC Trojan and we lived in Holland, my parents had friends (he was a career NCO in the Army) who were from Alabama. They presented me with my first college football t-shirt – though to this day I remember experiencing great confusion about what a Crimson Tide was, and why you would need to involve an elephant. And they had a very cute teenaged daughter who used to babysit me and my brother sometimes… and now that I think about it, the adults were plainly laughing at how I was completely smitten with what seemed like a very exotic blonde southern-ness about her.

So it’s all clear now. The Akins set me on a path, but I was redirected by my father getting a job in California, and I didn’t even know it at the time. Still, given the state of my blood pressure and so on, perhaps it’s as well I didn’t end up in SEC country. Between the football rage and the fried food, I’d be dead already. (Better that than life in the ACC, though.)